‘Most lawyers haven’t got a clue about pricing – no other industry in the world can do "cost-plus", and now neither can law firms. We’ve got to start training lawyers to estimate pricing.’

I went to an interesting conference about law management yesterday, run by the Society’s Law Management Section. Yes, you heard me, it was interesting. Not all of it, but that quote from Alan Hodgart’s closing speech made me sit up and listen, as he always does. Hodgart is one of the best ‘give it to you straight’ kind of law firm consultants going, in my opinion, because that’s what he does – no nonsense, I’m calling it like I see it. Tony Williams and Stephen Mayson I’ve also found good at doing this, so it’s not just Hodgart.

That point about pricing is, I concur, absolutely critical – what on earth do law firms think they are doing if they don’t have an idea of what ‘cost’ to the client they will incur?

Hodgart went straight from this into the direct correlation on a firm’s bottomline – costs. If you don’t know what something costs the client, you aren’t likely to know what it’s costing you to produce, and that’s Hodgart's point: firms he sees are regularly completely out on their gearing and profits, and don’t know how to price jobs beyond thinking of in terms of the billable hour. Billable hour is dead, he said – this isn’t something no one’s heard before, but I’m hearing it all the time now.

At the end of Hodgart’s talk there were a few questions – it was five o’clock and there were drinks on a table somewhere – and both of them got to me. One was, essentially: ‘If we’ve got underperforming partners or partners who won’t go out and market, hunt for work, should we fire them?’ To which Hodgart said simply ‘yes’, you should.

Next question: ‘I’m a litigator and we are just tied to billable hour, this is way we do things because the government pays things on an hourly rate, and the partners see this as the norm. How do we stop?’

Can you guess how Hodgart took that? Litigation, like any other work, has got to start showing some value for money, he said. Or else. Amen to that.